Ever since the first exploratory expeditions in the early modern period, North America has epitomized to Europeans a promise and the hope for the fulfilment of great expectations, be it of more freedom, greater wealth, social liberation or religious tolerance. While numerous features in this dialogic intercontinental relationship will hold true for North America in its entirety, the vast northern territories which we know as Canada today began to emerge early on as a specific iconic location in European mind-maps, and they definitely acquired a distinctive profile after the formation of the USA. As a rich source of cultural exchange and an important partner in political and economic cooperation Canada has come to occupy an important position in the cultural discourses of many European nations. It is these refractions and images of Canada which this volume thoroughly explores in European literature and culture. The contributions include literature, philosophy, language, life-writing and the concept of 'Heimat' (homeland) as well as the cultural impact of the World Wars. While there is an emphasis on literary texts, other fields of cultural representation are also included.

This volume presents a series of in-depth studies of particular authors or specific aspects of Germany in Canadian literature and culture, present and past. Individual investigations resonate with each other, adding up to a larger picture of Canada's views on Germany and things German in all their richness, complexity and historical persistence.

Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The collection is geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature. For the latter it is of particular benefit that the volume provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.

Co-published with the Waterloo Centre for German Studies For centuries, large numbers of German-speaking people have emigrated from settlements in Europe to other countries and continents. In German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss, more than forty international contributors describe and discuss aspects of the history, language, and culture of these migrant groups, individuals, and their descendants. Part I focuses on identity, with essays exploring the connections among language, politics, and the construction of histories—national, familial, and personal—in German-speaking diasporic communities around the world. Part II deals with migration, examining such issues as German migrants in postwar Britain, German refugees and forced migration, and the immigrant as a fictional character, among others. Part III examines the idea of loss in diasporic experience with essays on nationalization, language change or loss, and the reshaping of cultural identity. Essays are revised versions of papers presented at an international conference held at the University of Waterloo in August 2006, organized by the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, and reflect the multidisciplinarity and the global perspective of this field of study.

Transatlantic literary studies have provided important new perspectives on North American, British and Irish literature. They have led to a revision of literary history and the idea of a national literature. They have changed the perception of the Anglo-American literary market and its many processes of transatlantic production, distribution, reception and criticism. Rather than dwelling on comparisons or engaging with the notion of ‘influence,’ transatlantic literary studies seek to understand North American, British and Irish literature as linked with each other by virtue of multi-layered historical and cultural ties and pay special attention to the many refractions and mutual interferences that have characterized these traditions since colonial times. This handbook brings together articles that summarize some of the crucial transatlantic concepts, debates and topics. The contributions contained in this volume examine periods in literary and cultural history, literary movements, individual authors as well as genres from a transatlantic perspective, combining theoretical insight with textual analysis.

On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English is an attempt to listen to the various voices that participate in the current dialogue on the relationship between fiction and ethics. The editors’ introduction investigates the current state of affairs on the return to ethics in critical and literary consideration, and it opens up the way for the variety of approaches that follows. Participants include internationally recognized scholars like Andrew Gibson, Patricia Waugh, or Native American fiction writer and poet Gordon Henry, winner of the American Book Award in 1995. All in all, contributors cover a significant geographical diversity, and their approaches also vary from general theory to particular examples, from traditional interpretations to post-deconstruction ethics. Authors analyze texts both mainstream and marginal, colonial and postcolonial; they examine the ethics of race, gender and sexuality; the ethics of self-positioning and orientation; the ethics of style; the ethics of reception; the ethics of mode and genre; the ethics of extreme situations of evil, disease and fascism. In its search for a better understanding of the global/nationalistic world of today, On the Turn therefore moves beyond the scope of literary criticism into issues of wider, more urgent relevance. What should I, ought I, may I, must I, do, if anything, on the basis of reading, when I have read a literary work? What does reading a literary work authorize, or even command, me to do? Writing an essay about the work would be one response. On the Turn is a wonderfully diverse, learned, challenging, provocative, even sometimes controversial, collection of essays on the ethical dimensions of literature. This book is testimony to the continued lively interest in the ethical turn in literary studies. The authors are, for the most part, concerned with ethical theory and with ethically charged situations in postmodern novels in English, as they shape readers’ values and judgments. Poetry and non-print media are, however, also discussed. J. Hillis Miller UCI Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of California at Irvine The Ethics of Fiction is an important and exciting volume that explores with energy and rigour the connections between ethics and literature. Relating literature to philosophy, neurobiology, politics, religion, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the twenty two contributors richly advance ‘the ethical turn’ recently embraced by many critics. Works by authors such as Ian McEwan, A.S.Byatt, Charles Palliser, Hanif Kureishi, J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, George Orwell, E.L. Doctorow, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison and Paul Auster are presented in a new light and complex topics such as territoriality, the nature of love, Islamophobia and the politics of representation are tackled with imagination and intellectual integrity. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the dialogue between ethics and literature. Avril Horner, Professor of English, Kingston University

Humour is a key feature, laughter a central element, disrespect a vital textual strategy of postcolonial transcultural practice. Devices such as irony, parody, and subversion, can be subsumed under an interventionist stance and have accordingly received some critical attention. But literary and cultural postcolonial criticism has been marked by a restraint verging on the pious towards the wider significance and functions of laughter. This collection transcends such orthodoxies: laughter can constitute an intervention – but it can also function otherwise. The essays collected here take an interest in the strategic use of what can loosely be termed laughter – in all its manifestations. Examining postcolonial transcultural practice from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this study seeks to analyse laughter and the postcolonial in their complexity. For the first time, then, this collection gathers a group of international specialists in postcolonial transcultural studies to analyse the functions of laughter, the comic and humour in a wide range of cultural texts. Contributors work on texts from Africa, Asia, Australia, North America, the Caribbean, and Britain, reading work by authors such as Zakes Mda, Timothy Mo, VS Naipaul, and Zadie Smith. This interdisciplinary collection is a contribution to both, postcolonial studies and humour theory.